Reading between the lines, this definitely sounds like a form of sex addiction that you’re experiencing. Any kind of addiction is best tackled with professional help, and second best with the help of friends. I would strongly suggest in addition to seeking professional help, also talking to your friends saying “hey this is something I’m struggling with” and if they can be accountability buddies that’s even better!

Any addictions I’ve kicked and lifestyle changes I’ve made have been most successful by slowly adjusting. Quitting cold turkey is the easiest way to fail. Unlike my changes which were kicking coffee/caffeine, and reducing screen time, yours is is a perfectly healthy process gone awry, so your goal may not be complete elimination, but just a reduction back to a healthy level. You seem reluctant to share your current baseline, and I won’t push, but the easiest place to start is to say “I can wait another 20 minutes before I do that” and put it off a little, and just keep putting it off a little longer.

Maybe you might find doing a healthy habit every time you feel the urge to musturbate helps, such as doing 5 reps of a calisthenic exercise (excercise is also helpful in redirecting the blood that would otherwise be headed south!) or drinking some cold water (when I was quitting coffee I’d put my glass of cold water right next to my coffee. Every time I would reach for the coffee, I’d redirect my hand to the water and only go for the coffee if I still felt I needed it after the water, which most of the time I didn’t!) or maybe you’re just needing something to do with your hands and that’s how you end up masturbating some of the time. In that case, have you tried investing in some kind of fidget toy? Maybe try keeping that in your lap so every time you find your hands going for something to fidget with you can move to the fidget box or whatever instead.

It’s all about slowly shifting your normal, the same way that habits are formed just in reverse. It’s not going to feel like you’re making a big change at any point but tracking progress can help. Keeping a daily log of how many times you masturbated, when and for how long can help to see the trend. I would also suggest including the consumption of sexual content in that log. Just like masturbation it is perfectly healthy and fine for adults to consume sexual content, but too much of anything is going to be bad for you, and you’ll probably want to figure out your current baseline and goal for that as well.

Small steps can make a big impact in the long term. Just being able to set a small goal each day of “I’ll wait a couple more hours before I do that” or “maybe I’ll tackle cleaning today’s dishes before I rub one out” can add up faster than you might think. When I was quitting coffee, reducing from 64oz per day down to about 12oz per day only took a few weeks of active effort and was relatively easy with these methods, but eliminating down to zero took actual commitment. Reducing my screentime also took a few weeks to adjust the habits and baseline so that now I reach for a book or go work on a project instead of playing a video game for 4 hours. I haven’t pushed it to zero and that’s not my goal, so I’m close to where I want, I just have to keep this new baseline for a while so that it sticks

I literally only started caring about doing anything when when I decided I was trans. Kind of hard to start a hobby when you literally don’t enjoy doing anything at all.

Mental health can be a pain like that for sure! I’d still super encourage you to try something even if it’s just going for your stupid daily walk for your stupid mental and physical health. Even if you do it just to spite me and prove me wrong!

Sounds like a good plan to go try stuff on with a friend though! Lean on your friends while you heal, that’s what friends are for!

As others have said, the very first step should be therapy. 1 week after a hard breakup is not the time to be making major life decisions if you can avoid it. I know it sucks but you’re going to need time to heal. The way you wrote this it sounds less like discovering yourself and more like a form of rebound.

Since it sounds like you’re really grasping for something real to do right now, I’d suggest picking up a hobby, ideally something working with your hands/body in the real world like drawing or painting or sewing or running or biking or something

I also wonder if you need to spend more time figuring yourself out. Go to the mall and try on some clothing and see how it feels. Play with your hair a little. But mostly I’d suggest focusing more on a hobby for a few weeks and let your questions about yourself linger for a bit while you get through the roughest first part of the healing process

1 week after a breakup is again not the time to make life changing decisions. 1 week after a breakup is definitely the time to start therapy, poke at some new hobbies, go outside and move more and maybe go clothing shopping if you have the budget.

Yeah when I first saw the footage I assumed it was fake because it did not look like most plane crashes

For anyone unaware there’s an incredible growing body of research into Arctic-dwelling dinosaurs. They’re cool as hell and it’s extra cool knowing so much of this was discovered within my own lifetime

Crying Indian is such an interesting nugget of history. Paid for by the plastics lobby who saw the writing on the wall of getting regulated for excessive trash. This same plastics lobby also coined the term “litter bug” and tried to get the world to forget that bottled drinks were sold in reusable bottles that would be deposited, washed, refilled and resealed. But also like you said, the standard procedure was to just toss your trash outside and not worry about it before this campaign, in part because nearly all packaging was biodegradable if not completely reusable until about a generation before this ad campaign (the Ford model T literally came with instructions to reuse the crate it shipped in to make the truck bed for example)